A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  She soon made herself at home. “Flora was not an early riser and would appear in a sort of sleeveless ‘apron’ which wrapped around her body and tied with strings at the back,” recalled Allison. In the evenings, she would reappear in a “very smart skirt and blouse”, although her mannerisms often failed to match her otherwise respectable appearance. “Flora was a heavy smoker and… took the stance of a man while smoking her cigarette or small cheroot. Her legs and feet would be apart with her elbow balanced on one knee, the cigarette held between thumb and first finger,” described Allison.

  Her forceful and – with age – somewhat truculent character made her an overbearing house guest but such was her esteem in Dick’s eyes that she was given almost carte blanche to behave as she wished. “I personally owe most of the moral standards I have, and still try to keep, entirely to her,” he wrote years later.3 His wife Joan behaved with remarkable forbearance, but Flora’s presence must have been hardest of all on her. “She was not long in our home before she took over the running of the household and needless to say, my father,” Allison wrote. “There being no place for two women in the home my mother took an unpaid job with Sanders, an upmarket store in Bulawayo, as an alteration hand. Work even unpaid was not readily available and my mother was only too pleased to get it.”4

  But although she was near penniless – and thus reliant on the goodwill of Dick and his family to put a roof over her head – she was either unaware of how domineering she could be or simply too set in her ways to behave any differently. Worse still for Dick, she transferred her familiarity with dealing on the black market in occupied Belgrade to Bulawayo. “Butter was one of the commodities that was strictly rationed,” wrote Allison. “It was not long before Flora made friends with Mr Kay the local dairy farmer who supplied us with milk and soon Flora was getting more than an adequate supply of butter. Can you imagine the horror of my father, a detective inspector in the CID [Criminal Investigation Department], when he found out that Auntie was buying butter on the black market! The butter was quickly returned to its origin; but as Auntie had to have her butter the family rations were given to her and we had to make do with beef dripping.”5

  Full of hope that she would finally be granted the necessary permission from the Ministry of Health to renovate and reopen her Anglo-Yugoslav Children’s Sanatorium, in July, Katherine left Budva for Belgrade with Alice and her small team. She was thrilled on arrival to be informed that the ministry had agreed provisionally to repair the hospital building, and that it would also lend much needed financial support to help meet its running costs.6 But soon disturbing reports reached her that her unit instead would almost certainly be forced to leave Yugoslavia, in a renewed push by Tito and his Partisan authorities to rid their country of foreigners.

  Angered by the abrupt volte-face of the authorities, she booked an appointment to see the Minister of Health. To her surprise, when she was ushered into his office, the slight but feisty fifty-seven-year-old doctor recognized him. As a young medic he had been a frequent visitor to her wards. “Is it true we might have to leave?” she asked him directly. In response, he shamefacedly stuttered the official line that his government was trying to take charge of its own people. “Do you know doctor,” Katherine replied determinedly, as she pulled herself up to her full height in front of him, “I was looking after your Yugoslav children before you were born, or when you were a very small boy, so you can’t really look on me as an outsider in your country.” He laughed, then considered his response. “All right,” he replied. “I’ll make an exception for you and your team. You’ll be allowed to resume work at Kamenica.”7

  At first Flora had found plenty of distractions in Bulawayo. She had the town to explore, the well-stocked local library to visit, local “leading lights” to meet and black-marketeering to keep her busy. But as the weeks passed in the provincial Rhodesian town, she grew increasingly restless. She began to slip from the house after dinner without a word to anyone about where she was going. When she returned in the early hours of the morning, she was invariably worse the wear for alcohol. “No one seemed to know where she went,” recalled Allison. Then, one day, Dick was hauled in before his superiors at the BSAP only to be informed that they had received a series of complaints about her behaviour. “It turned out that… she had been fraternizing with the local African peasant population, sitting around an open fire and drinking beer made from sorgum,” wrote Allison. “This beer was brewed in a barrel which had originally contained oil or petrol. In those days this was called kaffir beer.” When he returned home, Dick confronted her. She was “extremely difficult”, he recorded. “When I spoke to her about it all she would say was ‘I have done what I like all my life and will continue to do so, and will not stay here if I can’t.’”8

  Dick’s superiors had already told him she had to go. “We said goodbye to Auntie at the railway station,” recalled Allison. “The car had again been taken out of mothballs for the occasion.”9

  Katherine raced back to Kamenica, bursting with enthusiasm at the prospect of finally beginning the work for which she had left Scotland thirteen months previously. With her came Alice, her secretary, Marion Tew, her matron, and Alwyn Griffiths, a teacher of handicrafts. Under the orders of the Minister of Health the local authorities began work repairing the building and re-establishing the water and electricity supplies, while Katherine took charge of re-equipping it. Alongside her driver Vasilj, a White Russian refugee who had worked for her before the war, she passed through the village knocking on doors to reclaim her furniture, much of which had been secreted away, while the equipment for her operating theatre was returned to her from a nearby military hospital. Much of what she lacked was given to her. UNRRA supplied the beds and bedding while, as word spread among her many overseas contacts that Katherine was yet again accomplishing the near-impossible, gifts and supplies began to arrive in volume including linen, blankets and boxes of children’s clothes from Canada and Britain. On 19th December, when she admitted her first five young tubercular patients, she also opened the country’s only joint post-Communist Anglo-Yugoslav enterprise.10 Not only had Katherine triumphed in her battle with the Partisan authorities, she had managed to reopen her hospital despite her increasing deafness, a legacy of the damage to her hearing that she had suffered while lying gravely ill with typhus in 1915.

  Desperate parents travelled to Kamenica from across Yugoslavia, all hoping for a bed for their child – often their only chance of survival. By the autumn of 1946, sixty-six children were being cared for in the wards by Katherine, her staff and Dr Stojanović, her former chief surgeon who had returned to work alongside her. “When I planned to spend a week in it, I thought the experience would be rather sad,” wrote Francesca Wilson, who was also now working for UNRRA. “I was quite unprepared for its gaiety. The… children at Kamenitza were as gay as a covey of birds, chattering, singing and laughing most of the day.”11

  But there was a darker side that Francesca – an admirer of the Partisans – did not report upon. As the months had passed the authorities had put the hospital under increasingly oppressive surveillance. The first step was innocuous enough. Katherine was informed that it would need a Yugoslav “administrative director”, but that she could choose who she wanted.12 Other measures soon followed. She was ordered to place a large photograph of Tito shaking hands with Stalin in the main hall. The telephone line between her villa in the village and the hospital was cut and a nurse was sent to her from Belgrade, whose furtive behaviour gave her away as a police informer. There was little Katherine could do about the telephone and the nurse, but she made short work of the photograph by mounting it alongside one of Tito shaking hands with Churchill. Both were removed shortly thereafter “by mutual agreement”.13

  Worse still, the Communist propaganda began to affect the children. The older ones refused to say their evening prayers while on Christmas Eve 1946 they sang Partisan songs instead of carols. “We’re celebrating the birthday of Jesus Christ,�
�� Katherine remonstrated to the eldest girl. “I don’t believe in that,” she shrugged in response. Katherine at least had the protection of UNRRA, under whose auspices the hospital was being run. But that autumn she was notified that their reconstructive work in Yugoslavia was coming to an end. When she wrote to the Ministry of Health about the future of her hospital, this time she received no response.14

  Flora arrived in Muizenberg, a seaside resort near Cape Town, in late October, after spending three months with Dick and his family. There she booked into the local YWCA hostel, dusted herself down and presented herself at Thomas Cook’s to arrange a passage to England, certain that she would be able to jump aboard the next transport home. “We’ve got nothing at all,” she was told instead by the manager. “We’ve already got hundreds waiting and there’s no boat at all next month. It will be months before we can find you a place.” “So what happens to people like me who can’t get away and have no money to stay long?” she asked dejectedly. “I’m sorry, there’s just nothing available. We’d help if we could,” he replied.

  The news threw Flora into a panic. “My dear Dick,” she wrote from her room that night. “Saw a nice young man who could do nothing… However dear Dick don’t worry about me something will turn up,” she continued as bravely as possible, “at present I have a roof over my head if they don’t turn me out for smoking in my bedroom, the only place I can, as it’s forbidden elsewhere, also card playing, and prayers every morning to which you are invited, but not compelled. Did you ever hear of such old fossils, 100 years behind the times. They want to uplift the younger generation, the only result is that no people will come here, most of them look as though they have been buried and dug up again.” Not only did she miss him terribly, she felt both vulnerable and alone. “I felt very lonely and unhappy last night but feel better now, it hardly seemed worth while getting through the war alive to land up in a YWCA hole. I could hardly bear saying goodbye to you at the station, but we will meet again in Jersey or somewhere please God.”15

  The day after arrival she began to trudge the streets in a frantic search for work, all the while recording her efforts in her diary. She approached a Jewish-owned wholesale dress shop (“we agreed not the job for me”), an insurance office (“Mr Arnold. Tested me with forms and I told him it would drive me mad”), a lawyer (“too late”), and a broker (“took someone else”). She also put an ad in the local paper. “No answers,” she wrote miserably a week after arrival. But the next day she scribbled that she had received “one answer to ad”, from Barnacks, a small typewriting company in Cape Town’s central Longmarket Street. Five days later she began work for them. The work – typing and copying letters – was monotonous, but the manager and his wife were friendly and kind, as were their handful of staff.

  Flora made the best of things. She moved from the “YWCA hole” to a room in central Cape Town. During her spare time she travelled by bus and train around the city and its environs, to walk along the beaches at Sea Point, Camps Bay and Fish Hoek. And she had people to look after her. She had a cousin, surgeon Dr Thomas Lindsay Sandes, in nearby Claremont, while a couple, the Sitters, took it upon themselves to invite her frequently to lunch, tea and social events. She wrote regular letters to her family and friends, and she recorded sending letters and parcels to “Simmonds” – Emily – to which she received regular replies.

  Still, it was a hand-to-mouth existence. She was paid enough to allow her the occasional beer, ice cream or inexpensive lunch or dinner out, but little more. To keep her expenses to a minimum she bought herself an “electric pot” so she could cook in her room and carefully recorded all her expenditures in her diary, from how much she paid for Marmite to how much she had left as a tip.

  Hard as she found things financially, she was relatively content. She passed the weekdays – and sometimes even her free Saturdays – typing happily in Mr Barnack’s small office. She spent her weekends tidying her room, doing chores, going into town or in walks along the coast, all the while filling her diary daily with the comfortable minutiae of her existence. “My free Saturday,” she jotted on 24th November in a typical entry. “Went to Barclays Bank. Sent parcel to Simmonds from Stuttefords. Had hair permed, 2 hours, awful ordeal. Mr & Mrs Sitters took me to Henry V at 5.20. Awfully good. I had supper at Greek Café.” Finally, around the start of April 1946, Flora received news from Thomas Cook’s that a place had been secured for her on a ship. Well aware that her stay in South Africa had been little more than a working holiday, she handed in her notice, said her many farewells, paid her bills and set sail.

  “They want the place but not us,” commented Katherine bitterly at the news that her Anglo-Yugoslav Children’s Sanatorium was being nationalized by the Partisan authorities.16 The Minister of Health had finally delivered the news to her in person that the hospital could remain open but the British staff would have to leave. It was with a feeling of utter wretchedness that Katherine walked around the wards of the hospital that had become the culmination of her life’s work, knowing that it was nearing an end. “It was with a heavy heart that I left the work which I had begun, then carried on for so many years,” she wrote later. In June 1947, over thirty-two years after she had first stepped onto Serbian soil as a young junior doctor, she packed what little she could and left for Scotland.17

  Katherine retired to windswept St Andrews, to a two-storey, terraced stone house that she shared with her sister Annie. She missed her work dreadfully, and kept in close touch with her former members of staff and with other veterans of work in Serbia, travelling often to London to see them. In 1949, following Tito’s ideological break with Stalin and a corresponding warming of Anglo-Yugoslav relations, Katherine was invited back to Kamenica to complete the final formalities of handing her hospital over to government ownership. In the company of her former matron, Alice Murphy, she returned in October. The hospital, from the outside, appeared just as it always had but, inside, it was overcrowded, there were shortages of material, no toys and few staff with adequate training. “Instead of lying immobilized, fixed to the bed in good comfortable positions, the children sat or lay without much attempt to straighten their deformities,” wrote Katherine. She was deeply upset when she returned home to St Andrews. “[The visit] really broke her heart,” recollected her niece. “I’ve never seen her in tears, but my sister Ann told me… that… she found Aunt Kathie, sitting on the floor, arranging her books in a bookcase, and crying bitterly. She was never really happy again.”18

  “To think after all I’ve done and the places I’ve been to that I should have to settle down in Wickham Market!” commented Flora wryly to one of her neighbours.19 Her family had set her up in “Folly’s End”, an ancient brick two-storey cottage on the main street of the Suffolk village after she had returned to English shores, near penniless, in August 1946. The irony of the name would not have been lost on her, nor the fact that she had come full circle. It was only one mile south-west of Marlesford, where she had spent much of her childhood.

  Her family welcomed her back with open arms. Several of her relatives lived nearby, including her sister Fanny. From the moment of her arrival she was invited along to their many family outings, including bathing picnics to Orford Ness, which gave her young relations the chance to glance surreptitiously at her when the famous, battle-scarred aunt donned a bathing costume. “When I saw her… I noticed there was rather a lot missing,” remembered her grand-nephew Arthur Baker. “She lost a lot of muscle in the small of her back and walked very stiffly.”20

  The villagers too had welcomed the return of the old soldier whose reputation had long preceded her arrival, and Flora also received a steady stream of visitors, including many Serbians.21 She repaid such visits, often turning up unannounced with the full expectation that she would be fed and watered. She had a “talent for imposing on others”, Arthur recalled, but she was also good company. “She did what she wanted to do,” he said. “She smoked, she drank fairly heavily – things that ladies didn’t do
you know – and she was very funny. She had an interesting sense of humour – not something you’d expect in an old lady.”22 She would also travel regularly to London to visit friends, on one occasion taking her young grand-nephew Ben Johnston and his sister with her. “It was very exciting,” remembered Ben. “She took us to the railway carriage and ordered a coffee for herself and drinks for us. Later a conductor came round and told her that we would have to go to our seats as they were about to start the meal service, but she refused to move. ‘We don’t have seats,’ she told him. She simply ordered another coffee. We were in awe of her audacity.”

  As her old wounds caught up with her and she became less mobile, she took to using a battery-powered electric chair given to her by her sister to travel between the local villages and would set off, white hair streaming behind her in the wind, as she pushed it to its full speed. “Quite often she couldn’t get back because the batteries had run flat and my father would have to bring her back,” recalled Arthur. “She would sometimes also have to be rescued between the villages when it ran out of juice.”23 Yet despite the best efforts of her family and friends they were unable to give her the sort of constant companionship that she had so thrived upon in the army and she reported feeling lonesome in the pages of the diary that she continued to keep. She also missed Yurie terribly, recalled one of the villagers.24

  “But I must say, it gets a little dull at times,” Flora sighed to a journalist who asked her about her life in 1954. She had ushered him through her low front door, which was framed by a fragrant tangle of honeysuckle and roses. Limping ahead of him with her walking stick in hand, she had led him to her tiny but tidy parlour for the interview and poured him tea. Duly, a few days later, his story appeared within the pages of the Weekend Reveille. “Kind Old Lady Led Me into Battle”, read the sensational headline, alongside a martial-looking photograph of Flora from the First World War.25